Results tagged “Buffalo”

Hello everyone.  In this blog I'm going to tell you all about our trip to the country of Tanzania, where we went on an 11-day camping safari with our friends, the Coxes.

We flew to Mount Kilimanjaro to meet up with our friends Kathy, Timmy, Brian and Jenny. Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa and it was cool to see that it had snow on top of it while we were sitting in the hot African plains. Our guides, Raymond and Onesmo, met us at the hotel and then we set off for our first camping spot, in Tarangire National Park.

When we got to our campsite, it was a lot different then the places we had stayed on our previous safaris.  Here, we had our own crew from Wild Frontiers go ahead of us and set up camp, so when we got there, there were four tents set up for our two families. There was also a big dining tent and an area for the crew to do the cooking and sleep. It was cool to be right out in the middle of the bush with no fences around the camp, so animals could walk right through. One night there were eighty elephants around our camp while we were asleep. All of the adults where wide awake, but us four kids slept right through it.  So we didn't get to see the elephants, but our parents told us about it.  On our last night of camping, a hyena went over to Kathy's tent and decided to "mark its territory" on it!

The other thing different about this type of safari were the jeeps we rode in. They weren't open air like the ones we had in South Africa and Botswana. Instead, the roof could come off so you can stand up and stick your head out to look at the animals. There were two jeeps, so half of the time the parents would be in one jeep while the kids were in another, which was really fun.

Hello people! I just went to South Dakota. The first animal I saw was a mountain goat. My Dad didn't believe me at first, but then we turned around and there they were! We saw baby goats with their mommies and one big goat that was in a cave along the cliff. I also saw lots of rabbits and got very close to them. One of the rabbits I saw was only a foot away from me. We saw a really big herd of buffalo too. Buffalo are also known as bison. They are huge and they can weigh up to 2,000 pounds.

Hello everybody! I'm here to tell you, that's right YOU (all you out there on the computer!), about my stop in South Dakota.

First, we drove over to Badlands National Park. Badlands National Park has small mountains made of sand and rocks called buttes. In addition to buttes, Badlands is also famous for its is fossils. The fossils are pretty easy to find because rain (and other kinds of erosion like wind) wash away sand and rock revealing fossils. Badlands is filled with mammal fossils, not dinosaur fossils, because it used to be an ocean and dinosaurs lived on land.

Surprisingly, Badlands is not famous for rabbits, but we sure did see a lot of them! They were everywhere. There was even a family of rabbits living under our cabin. Speaking of rodents, we saw prairie dogs. Prairie dogs live under ground and burrow. We also saw buffalo (or bison), which travel in huge packs called herds and at one point, were almost hunted to extinction. Strangely enough, we saw a camel on a cattle farm (notice we were in the prairie, not a desert), which we all thought was very random.

Now onto something that doesn't have to do with animals. We went to a ranger talk about the night sky. Did you know that any time now a star called Betelgeuse (pronounced like "beetle juice") is going to go supernova (or explode) and the scientists are predicting that we'll have two suns in our sky for one to two months! We also found out that the moon is actually drifting further away from the earth by an inch a year and in 1,000 years, we won't have it anymore. But don't worry, you won't be around then.